low income countries

When the negotiations for IDA17 were wrapped up in December, there was great relief that IDA deputies were supportive of an IDA expansion despite their own significant budget difficulties. As part of that package, the World Bank Group itself pledged to give IDA $3 billion from profits.

This was a generous gesture by the World Bank (albeit a drop in the bucket of total aid), but how good was it for the global development effort? Consider the following—net disbursements of official grants and concessional loans (the category where IDA flows appear) have expanded from $39 billion per year in the 1980s (in constant 2005 dollars) to $85 billion in 2010 and 2011. In contrast, official non-concessional lending (the category where IBRD and IFC flows appear) has stayed steady. The latter was $15 billion in the 1980s and $22 billion in 2010/11. This picture is even more striking when considering the amounts in terms of recipient GDP. Grants and concessional flows to low income countries have gone from 3% of their GDP in the 1980s to 13% today, while non-concessional flows to lower middle-income countries (excluding India and China) have gone from 0.7% to 0.3% of their GDP. In fact, from 2000 to 2009, non-concessional flows to lower middle- income countries (and to developing countries as a whole) were negative, implying that developing countries repaid more to official development agencies than they received in gross disbursements.